CompassLearning’s Eleanor Bowman on Automating Lead Management

For marketers struggling to keep the prospecting process organized, a marketing automation system can help eliminate the time-consuming need to coordinate lead management manually—an outdated approach that usually results in missed opportunities. By integrating an automation system from San Mateo, Calif.-based marketing automation solutions firm Marketo with contact management/CRM tool Salesforce.com, Eleanor Bowman, director of marketing communication at Austin, Texas-based, educational services provider CompassLearning, was able to increase efficiency and return for her company’s lead generation and lead nurturing activities.

Target Marketing: What were your goals in automating your lead management process?Eleanor Bowman: We really wanted to develop a pipeline for our sales folks in order to deliver sales results. We also wanted to make sure what we were doing was aligned with tools we already had in place. The goal here was to redeliver qualified, high-quality leads to our people and have some assurance we were giving them the best of the best. When I joined the company, there were lead generation activities going on but no process to manage them. There was no automation around how they were handled. Now, we have built a strong lead generation program from the ground up. For the first time, we are able to predict the number of leads, predict how many are going to be sales-ready leads and then push that through Salesforce.com.

TM: How have you leveraged the automation process for your e-mail campaigns?EB: The features of this system also allowed us to set up relatively simple automated campaigns. You can have your scoring and flow set up to run automatically after a campaign. For example, you can automatically send an e-mail, wait a period of time before following up with another e-mail and then create a task in Salesforce.com for a rep to follow up with customers—all automated through the program. Then the program scores and analyzes each portion of the campaign.